Svalbard is a band that you may not have heard of, but you’re gonna want to pay attention, because in a few years when they’re huge, you can say you got in on the ground floor. Their new album It’s Hard To Have Hopecame out just last month, and it’s got the ferocity of black metal fueled by the swirling introspection of shoegaze and post-rock dynamics and, well, weirdness.

On this episode of The Weekly Riff, Svalbard’s Serena Cherry demonstrates their song “For The Sake Of The Breed”.

As Editor-in-Chief of Gear Gods, I've been feeding your sick instrument fetishism and trying unsuccessfully to hide my own since 2013. I studied music on both coasts (Berklee and SSU) and now I'm just trying to put my degree to some use. That's a music degree, not an English one. I'm sure you noticed.